"Bill Greganti" <t20030101(_at_)greganti(_dot_)com> writes:
Hi All,
I'm slightly confused on getting fetchmail to run in daemon
mode. Let me
start by saying I'm running a Debian 3.1 (Sarge) system
with Fetchmail
6.2.5. I have the following files setup...
/etc/fetchmailrc
-rw------- 1 fetchmail root 65 Apr 14 23:33 fetchmailrc
set daemon 300
set postmaster ""
set no bouncemail
set no spambounce
set syslog
Please do not run fetchmail as root. Copy your /etc/fetchmailrc
settings into the user's ~/.fetchmailrc and remove /etc/fetchmailrc.
Actually, the daemon runs as the user fetchmail by default, not as root.
My question should be obvious now, but is there any way to
do this with only
one fetchmail process and still leave the files in
~/.fetchmailrc so the
users can edit them?
This is not a reasonable or acceptable approach to fetchmail
configuration.
If users need to run fetchmail, have them run fetchmail. This
can happen
from a crontab that run fetchmail once per hour (it will keep
running in
daemon mode and just wake up once an hour in addition to
that, or start
itself if it isn't run), or from a root script that scans user's
directory for those files and uses "su" to start fetchmail under the
user's accounts.
I did see a similar script in the archives, I'll go back and find it. I
didn't like that approach simply because of the number of fetchmail
processes running. The use of this server is still growing, but I'm
expecting at least a few thousand users in the long run. Although I'm
beinginng to see another problem arising... with only one daemon running and
thousands of users, a relatively short poll time becomes useless as the
daemon would process mail constantly. In this case multiple daemons might
be more efficient.
Not being real familiar with fetchmail yet, does anyone see a problem with
thousands of processes running?
Also, in the spirit of using a single fetchmail process against the advice
given, does anyone see problem with writing a script to conpile all of the
~/.fetchmailrc files into /etc/fetchmailrc?
Bill Greganti
Greganti Consulting
714-746-3356